caregiver infant interactions

• attachment is a close two way emotional bond between two individuals in which each individual sees the other as essential for their own emotional security.
• reciprocity is the process in which a behaviour is matched during an interaction.

  For example, smiling back when someone smiles at us.
• Feldman (2007) states that reciprocity can be seen in interactions from 3 months of age.

  This conclusion was supported by Meltzoff & Moore (1997) who demonstrated that babies as young as 12-27 days would try to imitate facial and physical gestures.
• interactional synchrony is a process where a parent's speech and an infant's behaviour become finely synchronised so that they are in direct response to one another.
• Isabella & Belsky (1991) hypothesised that caregiver infant pairs that developed secure attachment relationships would display more synchronous behaviour than babies with insecure relationships.
• What were Isabella & Belsky's (1991) findings?

  babies observed at 3 and 9 months

  secure group interacted in a well-timed, reciprocal, mutually rewarding manner.

  pairs classed as insecure due to interactions being minimally involved, unresponsive and intrusive.

  avoidant pairs displayed maternal intrusiveness and overstimulation while resistant pairs were poorly coordinated, underinvolved and inconsistent.

  Concluded that different interactional behaviours predicted attachment quality.
• Meltzoff & Moore (1977) used infants as young as 2 weeks old and observed them via camera.

  Infants observed an adult displaying one of three distinctive gestures.

  Independent observers were asked to view footage and state the actions of the infant.

  A positive correlation was found between the infant's actions as well as the primary caregiver's actions.

  Findings suggest that imitating was felt to be occurring.
• Meltzoff & Moore's research was a double blind experiment so the observer did not know what the aim of the experiment was.

  This prevented any primary caregiver or experimenter bias and made sure the infants were really carrying out these actions.
• A strength of research into caregiver-infant interactions is that it mainly consists of observations of mother infant interactions where both parties are being filmed from multiple angles which ensures that very fine details of behaviour are recorded and can later be analysed.

  These controlled observations increase the credibility of findings from caregiver-infant interactions and can also increase reliability since many people can observe and draw conclusions from the filmed research.
• Also, babies are unaware that they are being observed so their behaviour does not change in response to controlled observation.

  Therefore, the lack of demand characteristics suggests that the research can be relied upon and has good internal validity.